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July 04, 2005

If you ask what good I have missed lately, then the answer has the be the Live 8 concerts. Concerts in nine cities were staged simulteneously where the mainstream musicians around the world performed. An estimated 3 billion people watched the concerts either live, via TV or online.

Sadly I couldn't find any cable channels running the shows live in Dhaka and that is really pathetic. I was too busy yesterday, but caught glimses of the live coverages at my work PC via AOL Music. AOL's coverage was so superior, even with the low bandwidth available in Bangladesh, it may one day serve as a historical marker in drawing people to computers instead of TV screens for big events. With a click of the mouse, AOL visitors could jump from a video feed of the London concert to one from Philadelphia, Berlin or Rome. The performances were shown in their entirety. AOL programming chief Bill Wilson claimed that 160,000 people were simultaneously viewing the video streams at any given time, and that more than 5 million people sampled the video at some point during the day. Whereas MTV coverages were poor with many commercial breaks & shortened clippings.

The motto of the Live 8 is "The Long Walk To Justice" a symbolic journey of millions of people across the world to show the G8 leaders that the world is watching and waiting. According to Live 8 website, the mentor behind the event musician Bob Geldof says: "By doubling aid, fully cancelling debt, and delivering trade justice for Africa, the G8 could change the future for millions of men, women and children." It must be noted here that the previous such effort "Live Aid" was staged in 1985 which had the mission of raising fund for Ethiopian refugees. However, Havilland at Samizdata has other thoughts:

"But alas the main thrust of what Live 8 seems to be about is to induce the governments of the G-8 to take money from their taxpayers and assign it to nebulous and frequently counter-productive projects in Africa, often in effect propping up the regimes who are the single biggest cause of their own nation's problems and directly responsible for local poverty."

The African blogosphere had other views too. The world's most famous African, Nelson Mandela said at Johannesburg concert: "Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity, it is an act of justice."